The Only Winning Move

So results are in from Nevada and it looks like Ron Paul has done very well indeed. He’s in second place with 13% to Romney’s 51% - his best showing yet. This means he’s officially beaten all of the Republican candidates save Romney (the presumed nominee) in at least one contest. Any media outlet that would now like to claim he isn’t a serious candidate will be indulging in fantasy.

Better yet, the linked article points out that 25% of the Republican caucus-goers in Nevada are Mormon (it is next-door neighbors with Utah after all) and that about half of Romney’s votes owe to this group. If you look at the non-Mormon vote, Romney’s lead over Ron Paul is slight at best, and Ron Paul’s lead over McCain more substantial. In other words, without the homecourt identity politics advantage, Romeny would still have beat Paul, but not nearly as convincingly.

It should be poined out that Romney has yet to win a contest without resorting to identity politics. In Nevada it’s his religion, in Michigan it’s because he “grew up there.” He obviously can’t identify with every region of the country; we’ll see how well he does out of his homecourt(s).

But I’ll think about that later. Right now I’m positively ecstatic at Paul’s 2nd-place showing. This means my hopes for a third party run are far from out of the question. Maybe Paul will forge libertarians into a viable voting block after all.

Anyone who doesn’t see the guns behind government has never tried disobeying a law.

Indeed. That’s Brian Doherty of Reason Magazine writing in the LATimes in response to a kind but subtle smear of libertarianism by former New Republic writer Michael Kinsley.

I’m generally with Virginia Postrel when she implies that Reason is these days too concerned with being hip to give libertarianism a serious face. But when they get it right, they get it right - and this LATimes article is … right. If libertarianism has one indisputably useful thing to offer mainstream political discourse, it’s this: that every law you pass is a restriction of someone’s freedom, and before you jump on the bandwagon you really need to ask yourself if it’s worth putting someone in jail over it. Because invariably, that’s what laws mean. Sure, you can comfort yourself by “only” slapping fines on something - but if a person refuses to pay the fine?

No, the inescapable fact is that there are always guns behind government power. I blogged yesterday about this in regard to Mitt Romney. There is a video on YouTube where a medical marijuana “patient” (probably not really, but that hardly invalidates the question) corners Romney and asks him whether he would put him and his doctor in jail for using medical marijuana. Romney, coward that he is, walks away and ignores it. But the truth is this is something that every Drug Warrior needs to ask himself. Is marijuana - recreational or otherwise - really so dangerous to the general public that you think people should go to pound-me-in-the-ass prison over it? People should be separated from their families, companies should lose productive employees, shops should lose valuable customers, the government should lose tax revenue and instead incur a cost, a person should be locked in a cage with other, more violent offenders, children should lose parents and become wards of the state, people with promising careers ahead of them should forever be consigned to the underclass… Is marijuana really so dangerous to “the public” that you can justify all of this? And ditto for every other law. Because every law you support comes with precisely this price tag associated. Mitt Romney should not have been allowed to dodge this question. Reporters should be hounding him with it in every press conference until he looks the camera straight in the eye and admits that this is indeed what he supports. Ron Paul, for his part, could spend more time at the debates asking questions like this rather than banging on about Muslims’ feelings, actually. Because what’s good for the Romney the goose is at least as good for ganders Huckabee and Giuliani. And of course no Dems off the hook here. Least of all the Dems, actually - because that is the party whose supporters indulge the vanity that they are the party of individual liberty. If that’s the case, why does Hillary Clinton want to put people in jail for making video games she doesn’t like? Why does Barack Obama want to put people in jail for owning guns that don’t meet his cosmetic specifications?

If libertarianism has one valuable thing to contribute to public political discourse, this is it. Reminding people that all their feel-good measures come with a real social cost, and that they need to be more careful about when they say “there oughta be a law…“

Here are two YouTube links to Romney being a prick.

The first one shows him cornered by a medical marijuana patient. It seems like a setup to me - that is, I doubt this guy and his oh-so-conveniently placed friend with the video camera are really on the up-and-up. Nevertheless, they ask him a point-blank question that everyone who opposes medical marijuana use needs to be able to answer, and that’s “will you have me and my doctor arrested if I use marijuana for medicinal purposes?” Where, I wonder, is our vaunted press on this issue? That is, why do citizens have to stage instances like this to get answers? That question ought to be par-for-the-course in press conferences. Do you believe in your policy enough to actually beat someone to the ground and throw them in jail for it? Is medical marijuana so harmful to the public that you feel you can justify this? If you can’t, you need to back down. Romney, slick coward that he is, simply ignores the question and walks on.

The second one shows a reporter challenging Romney on his claim that he “does not have lobbyists running [his] campaign.” The reporter points out that someone called Ron Kaufmann, who happens to be a lobbyist, is a senior adviser to Romney’s campaign. Romney retorts that because Kaufmann is neither his chief advisor nor his campaign manager, that he is therefore not “running [his] campaign.” Sensibly, the reporter asks if any campaigns have lobbyists running them by that definition. Point, set, match to the reporter. Honestly, what a moronic technicality to come back with. “My senior advisor is not a lobbyist, ergo I am completely free of their influence?” Does ANYONE buy this crap?

Romney is a weasel and a prick.

Via a link to a link to a link to someone’s link in the comments section to a post on Reason Hit and Run, there’s this really cool web app that shows you the computer’s thinking pattern as it plays you in Chess.

Have fun with it here.

The point, really, is that it’s pretty useless on the whole. It tells you what you always suspected: that computer chess is hugely “brute force,” consisting of considering a staggering combination of moves. Silicon computers are massive speed, smallish memory capacity, whereas human brains (which are computers) are slow speed, huge memory capacity. The mystery in Chess is sorta why humans are able to do it so well at all. What tips us that certain lines of thought are probably fruitless early enough to stop them and move on to something else?

It’s sort of an urban myth in Japan (I say that because I haven’t been able to verify this on the web) that best all-time Shogi player Habu Yoshiharu is at his most relaxed when playing. That is, it’s widely said that brain scans of him playing show that he’s thinking less than normal. Maybe true, maybe not, but it certainly squares with the idea that whatever humans are doing when they’re doing things like playing Chess well, it’s manifestly NOT “brute force.” I can’t remember which of Habu’s biographers said it, but I remember reading a book about Habu in Japan that said something like “it’s an open secret in the Shogi world that the move you make is just the one you like. There isn’t any great reasoning that goes into it - rather, one just occurs to you and you spend all your clock time justifying it to yourself.” I can vouch for that for myself. I play Chess pretty well. I’m not great by any means, CERTAINLY nothing like a pro - but I do a good job. And that’s pretty much how I play too, yeah. Some move just “seems right.” There’s one that I just want to do for whatever reason. And most of what looks like “thinking” to an outside observer is just me playing devil’s advocate with myself, trying to figure out what would go wrong if I did that move that I “want” to do.

Still, click the link and enjoy a round. It’s fun watching the computer play through pretty much every possibility before making up its mind.

All of this, of course, is occasioned by the fact that Bobby Fischer’s just died. Not the great loss for the Chess world that it probably should be (he hasn’t played professionally in decades), but a great loss nonetheless. My favorite alltime Chess game is one of Fischer’s. I haven’t been able to find the transcript online, but if I run across it I will post it in an update as a my memorial.

This is The Only Winning Move’s 400th entry.

To honor this occasion, I link to a very cool blog from the “now why didn’t I think of that?” genre. It is, in its own words, “an ongoing screed against the most self centered group of people who ever walked the planet.” That’s right, it’s an anti-baby boomer blog.

About bloody time!

Best of luck to you.

George Will has a column today taking a slice out of John McCain. No general complaints here: McCain is indeed one of the bad guys running this year. But I do have some complaints on specifics.

Regarding the reimportation of drugs from Canada, which McCain supports, Will has the following to say:

In ABC’s New Hampshire debate, McCain said: “Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?” A conservative’s answer is:

That amounts to importing Canada’s price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others — new pain-relieving, life-extending pharmaceuticals — would be unavailable. Setting drug prices by government fiat rather than market forces results in huge reductions of funding for research and development of new drugs. McCain’s evident aim is to reduce pharmaceutical companies’ profits. But if all those profits were subtracted from the nation’s health care bill, the pharmaceutical component of that bill would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent — and innovation would stop, taking a terrible toll in unnecessary suffering and premature death. When McCain explains that trade-off to voters, he will actually have engaged in straight talk.

Erm - nice straw man, there, George. But let’s give him his due: it’s true that this is an example of McCain failing to engage in the “straight talk” which is supposedly (if you hyptnotize yourself to believe everything you read in the New York Times) his signature. Reality is, as Will says, that allowing mass reimportation of drugs from Canada will not end up saving consumers all that much money in the long run, a fact McCain seems loathe to mention. But that is not because of the reason Will gives. Look, Mr. Will, the pharmaceutical companies are big kids. They’re capable of looking out for themselves. When the Canadian government places price restrictions on sales of their product in Canada, they have a choice whether or not to sell that product there. What they’ve been doing so far is complying with Canada’s restrictions to the extent they can still make a profit and making up for the loss below projection by selling their stuff at higher prices here. What these restrictions amount to, really, is a price subsidy all wrapped up neatly in bows from the consumers of the USA to the consumers of Canada. Removing the reimportation restrictions is the free market thing to do. It forces the drug companies to put some teeth into their negotiations with the Canadian price czars, because those price czars will no longer be able to shield their caps from market competition (for the economically challenged reading this: yes, market competition can drive up prices too in the event that maintaining the current low price would result in a shortage, as would be the case for certain drugs in Canada if their reimportation were allowed). And now let’s be realistic about what kind of effect this is all going to have on the market. There are about 30million Canadians and 10 times as many Americans. It’s simply implausible that a market that is 1/10th the size of ours with a smaller range of available products is going to have all that much effect on how business is done here. Remember that drugs reimported from Canada mean shipping and delay markups. No - all reimportation is going to do is dry up the supply in Canada and force the price board up there to approve higher prices (and, hopefully, eventually shut down). In some twisted Democrat worldview, I suppose that’s “mean” to Canada - but that’s really their problem. They are free, after all, to scrap their single-payer system and let some market sanity back into the deal.

I have no particular objection to the rest of Will’s column. Indeed, on a personal level McCain has long been my least favorite candidate in the race (though Huckabee is my actual overall least favorite) largely for the reasons Will mentions: his intolerance for dissent and the media myth that he’s a “straight talker.” “Maverick” is indeed “the media encomium reserved for Republicans who reject important Republican principles.” (If it weren’t, Ron Paul would rightly receive the same accolade, which of course he doesn’t.) But I reject the idea that it’s somehow the government’s responsibility to enforce the pharmaceutical companies’ regional pricing schemes. Private industries should not get this kind of government protection. If the drug companies decide to comply with Canada’s fantasy pricing schemes, that’s a decision they should take fiscal responsibility for. It is not the job of the American consumer to help Canada pretend it has a healthcare system.

There is, of course, one Republican candidate who “gets it” on this issue.

Pharmaceutical companies certainly own the drugs they produce, and they have every right to sell them at any price they choose. They also have the right not to sell their products to foreign pharmacies, or to condition sales on an agreement that such pharmacies will not reimport into the U.S. They do not have a right, however, to use government to prevent Americans from buying drugs from any willing seller they choose, regardless of where that seller may be located.

Those, of course, are the words of Ron Paul, doing some actual “straight-talking” on the issue.

I think the most incredible thing about this election so far is that while the Republicans flounder - for the first time in living memory, really - on a choice of candidates, you hear so much griping about how there isn’t really a conservative candidate in the race. I mean, there’s Fred Thomspson, but he’s a regular in the 4th-place spot in all the primaries (and caucuses) so far. Doesn’t seem much hope he’ll win. Nobody mentions the elephant in the living room: Ron Paul. In addition to regularly beating Giuliani and Thompson in all the primaries so far (OK, granted, he finished just barely behind Giuliani in New Hampshire), Paul actually is conservative. We’re talking the Real Deal. The kind of conservative that makes up the base and that Barry Goldwater was supposed to have reintroduced the Republican Party to in 1964. Honestly, Ron Paul’s voting record speaks for itself on this. If I may borrow a talking point from Carl Worden:

He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

To which I might add

He is reliably federalist.
He is reliably pro-life.
He believes in Jesus.
He is firmly against amnesty for illegal aliens.

(Of my addendum list, only the first item appeals to me, but there is no denying that these things are all ambrosia to run-of-the-mill Republicans.)

So what’s up? Why is it that the nominal party of small government is scratching its head over McCain, Romney and Giuliani, of all people, when the conservative to end all conservatives is sitting right there under their noses on the ticket?

I think it’s fair to say at this point that the Republican Establishment has been hijacked. To cite some general examples… Yesterday Michelle Malkin ran a column on Townhall begging for “a man who can say No:”

I need a man. A man who can say “No.” A man who rejects Big Nanny government. A man who thinks being president doesn’t mean playing Santa Claus. A man who won’t panic in the face of economic pain. A man who won’t succumb to media-driven sob stories.

Taking her at her word, it sounds like the man she wants is Ron Paul. But guess who doesn’t even get a mention in her column?

She finishes with

As we head toward Super Tuesday, the subprime mess and the economy will dominate — and the Do Something Democrat candidates will turn their spigot of overextended homeowner sob stories on full blast. Do Republicans want a clear alternative to liberal-nomics? Or will you settle for a lip-service conservative who will reward fiscal recklessness with only slightly less government intervention than the Dems?

Which is about as well-articulated an argument for nominating Ron Paul as it is possible to write. So why is he off the island? I mean, to not even get a mention? No mistaking it - that’s not an oversight, it’s deliberate.

And then there’s Fox News, which banned Paul from the New Hampshire Debates without explanation. As the LA Times aptly put it just ahead of that event:

Fox doesn’t return phone calls or e-mails seeking an explanation for excluding Paul, probably because it’s very difficult to explain how you invite Giuliani, who’s already lost one election to Paul, and the more-famous Thompson, who ran ahead of the lesser-known Paul in Iowa but trails him in New Hampshire polls. And, frankly, Paul probably leads all Republicans in fourth-quarter fundraising with his nearly $20 million haul. But you won’t be able to hear him on Fox Sunday where he would be the only Republican candidate to oppose the Iraq war, advocate pulling our troops home from all around the world to save money for domestic needs and slashing numerous federal departments.[emphasis in original]

(Of course, now that Giuliani’s managed to beat him once, he’s back in their good graces.)

And then there’s the matter of Jacob Sullum’s column about the newsletter authorship controversy. That was a hot story for conservatives back when it looked like Ron Paul wrote them and was just covering his ass by blaming it on a ghostwriter. But now that the preponderance of people involved in the Libertarian movement have weighed in and as good as all of them think the real author was either Lew Rockwell or Eric Dondero, and now that even high-ranking NAACP men vouch for Ron Paul on the race issue, Jacob Sullum can’t get his column onto Townhall’s front page. Jacob Sullum’s columns ALWAYS make the Townhall front page - even when they’re about things conservatives don’t like to hear (like how the War on Drugs is destroying civil liberties). But not yesterday. Gee - wonder why that is?

Ron Paul supporters are supposed to all be conspiracy theory nuts, so here’s one of my own: there is a media conspiracy to ignore Ron Paul. I don’t mean a spy-novel conspiracy. No deliberate planning, no smoke-filled backrooms, not THAT kind of a conspiracy. I just mean a confluence of conscious, deliberate decisions to exclude Ron Paul from national attention on the part of people who are responsible for bringing conservatives the news.

Granted, some of this is the result of legitimate policy differences. The Republican Party might be new at making the world safe for democracy, but they’ve long prided themselves on being the party that takes national security seriously. They’re also generally less likely to shy away from patriotic sentiment than the Dems. Paul could’ve been forgiven for opposing the Iraq War, I think, if he didn’t have such a tendency to couch his opposition in “Blame America” terms. Giuliani and McCain still wouldn’t be satisfied, of course, but there are ways to articulate your opposition to the war that pluck patriotic heartstrings. All he really has to say is that soldiers sign up to defend Country and Constitution, and sending them away to unconstitutional wars with ambiguous goals based on shoddy intelligence work and with no clear homeland defense motivation was hardly in their noble job description. But of course, that isn’t how Paul phrased it. And the more he hammers on implying that the US brought 9/11 on itself, the less like a fit for the Republican Party he seems.

But I think there’s more to it than just legitimate distaste for the whiff of “blame America” motivations behind Paul’s foreign policy. Indeed, if that’s all it were they would probably WANT to parade him in front of their voters; he would discredit himself. Unfortunately for the Republican establishment, on every other issue Paul is about as solid a traditional Republican as it is possible to be, and this is embarrassing for them.

It didn’t take long after Bush’s first election for it to become quite clear that he was nothing like the small-government/”humble” foreign policy president he had campaigned as. The man was clearly allergic to vetos, and this despite some of the worst pork spending in the history of the Republic. There were steel tariffs almost immediately: welcome back Herbert Hoover. And that “humble” foreign policy was anything but. The man who might as well have said “read my lips, no nation-building” didn’t hesitate to propose exactly that. And in the meantime, of course, there was the federalization of education, the largest growth in entitlement spending in recorded history, budget surpluses turned into record-smashing deficits, all manner of due process abuses, etc. etc. etc. None of these things are traditional “Republican” positions, and yet the “Republicans” in Congress didn’t seem to have much objection to them as they passed.

The whole Republican schtick over the last 8 years has been to excuse it all by pointing to the Democrats and warning that things would be worse under their leadership. As they no doubt would have been. But a feeble excuse is still a feeble excuse, and in the 2006 midterms the base made known just how thin that excuse was wearing. Now the Republican Party is in richly-deserved disarray. It’s hardly surprising that the leading candidates haven’t learned a new game yet. They’re trying to rehash all that “you’ll be worse off under the Dems” crap - and they might even get away with it but for Ron Paul.

But there he sits. Good ol’ Dr. No. The one Republican of the bunch who never flinched, never relaxed into the political comfort zone of larding his constituents with pork and trusting the voters to return him because “the Dems are worse.” The one Republican who never failed to point out just when and why they were acting outside the constitution. For a party that prides itself on being for “principled, constitutional government,” it must hurt to have Paul put the lie to it all. He’s living proof that they could and should have been doing a lot better than they did.

Truth be told, I don’t think most media outlets know what to do with Paul. Politics has become a flag-flying game. For the average voter, it ceased to be about policy a long time ago. What it is now, really, is an extension of the culture wars. People affiliate with a party because it flatters their self-image in some way. Most commentary operates on a left-wing right-wing scale the simplicity and illogic of which can hardly be overstated. And so I think media outlets just don’t know what to do with Paul. He’s “right wing” as far as that whole small government and pro-life thing goes. But then, he doesn’t play ball on Iraq. Or on gay marriage. Or on PATRIOT or the War on Terror or even Social Security and Medicare. He can’t easily be pigeonholed into their neat little categories.

If his ideas were sweeping the nation, they might look on this as an interesting challenge. And if he were completely unpopular, of course, they could safely write him off and wouldn’t have to face the issue at all. Frustratingly for most media outlets, Paul is neither popular nor unpopular. He has just enough support that they have to cover him a bit, but not so popular that it’s worth their time to really investigate his appeal. And so they all think it would be nicer if he would just go away and let them get back to their tried-and-true “stupid party” vs. “evil party” story.

And that’s where I think it comes from, this “conspiracy.” The media just doesn’t know what to do with him; it’s easier if he’s either ignored or written off as a nut. And if you wondered why it was Fox News in particular that seems complicit, that’s because in addition to being a puzzle to them, he’s also embarrassing.

But it is precisely this kind of censorship that makes me hopeful. Ron Paul isn’t going to be the next president; my support was never based on a hope that he would win. All I need him to do is make clear to the RNC that there is a strong contingent of voters among their base for whom small-government principles are non-negotiable. That they feel the need to edit him out of the party’s image tells me two heart-warming things: (a) that they’re worried about him and (b) that there will be no mistaking, come November, what it means if a significant number of Republican voters stay home and cost them the election. Their deliberate attempts to ignore him, in other words, are the surest sign he’s succeeding.

This just in: even Austin Branch NAACP President Nelson Linder vouches for Ron Paul on the racism controversy, thus slamming the final nail into the coffin of the Kirchick smear. If even high-ranked NAACP members come to Paul’s defense on the charge, what’s left in it? So that’s it then: Ron Paul is not racist, and someone needs to fire Jamie Kirchick.

Via a comment on an earlier post, I came across this interesting blog post by Peter Saint-Andre, who also occasionally comments on Samizdata. Peter writes:

That said, I sense that there has long been a seamy underside to some modern advocates of the Constitution and private property rights. In particular, they are attracted to something like libertarianism because it would allow them to discriminate against people of color (”it’s my property, I can decide whether to hire black people at my company” or whatever). Even Ayn Rand, who supposedly held that reason is much more fundamental than liberty, made such arguments in the run-up to the civil rights legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in the mid-1960s, and wrote her lone essay on the irrationalism inherent in racism only upon being urged to do so by her acolyte Nathaniel Branden (or so the story goes).

This undercurrent is disturbing and must be squarely faced.

This is a topic I’ve been meaning to address for some time, and the recent Kirchick article “exposing” Ron Paul’s (allegedly) racist past seems as good an excuse as any.

Libertarian websites and publications do seem to attract their fair share of racists. But why? What is it about us that racists find attractive? Because from where I stand, and as I have said before, libertarianism is the only wholly non-racist political philosophy available. We are the only political movement that wants to write group identity completely out of the public sphere - hardly a position racists can be drawn to!

So why do they sometimes seem to be drawn to us?

I guess Peter’s explanation is partly correct. Some of our specific policy positions just happen to resemble those of racists, albeit with completely different goals and motivations. In particular, we have a common enemy in anti-discrimination laws - libertarians because we believe in the primacy of property rights, but racists because … well, because they need the hurdle out of their way. The same will be true of hate speech laws. Libetarians oppose them because we’re the only party that unambiguously defends free speech; racists oppose them for the obvious reason that it’s their speech in particular that’s being censored. And the same, actually, goes for foreign aid to Israel and Africa. Libertarians do not believe in coerced charity (oxymoron, actually); people who hate blacks and Jews are just happy not to be forced to give money to them.

But anyone looking for a deeper philosophical connection between racism and libertarianism will be disappointed: these surface policy similarities are entirely a coincidence of the fact that racists happen to be out of vogue at the moment. Flash back to Nazi Germany, for example, and libertarians (classical liberals) found themselves attractive to casual communists for similar reasons. Radical collectivists crash our party as it suits them. We definitely didn’t invite them.

But as I said, I think this is only part of the story. The rest of it has to do with the kind of racists that libertarians attract. I don’t think most of the “racist” lurkers on libertarian sites are actually committed racists. The true Nazis (like the true Communists before them) stay well clear of us. The racists we attract are just misguided, usually temporarily, and are rarely actual fascists. They are attracted to Libertarianism because it offers them a refuge from the pressures of trying to fit in with the mainstream guys.

There is, it must be said, something distinctly Maoist about the way race is discussed in modern society. There are certain approved opinions, not all of which are wholly rational, which simply may not be deviated from. Public statements which seem likely to offend the exceedingly delicate (or, more likely, insincere) sensibilities of minoirty leaders - no matter how irrational the basis for that offense may be - are reqired to be prefaced with some sort of hyperbolic denunciation of racism, especially if the speaker is white. And hyperbolic denunciations of racism are often offered even when there is no particular social basis for it at all. By way of example, a commenter on a post on Samizdata about the Jena 6 writes the following:

I agree with the sentiment with the original article; that said, I hope the fuckers who put up nooses to intimidate black people die a very long, painful death.

Because … why, exactly? How is dying a “very long, painful death” even remotely commensurate with the “crime” of symbolically “intimidating” someone? But this is the kind of nonsense that issues from the mouths of otherwise rational people on the fear that someone, somewhere - ANYWHERE - even someone reading their comment on the internet they don’t know and will never meet, might mistake them for a racist.

A similar phenomenon is the way many people seem to feel the need to justify any opposition to policies that race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton support primarily on the basis that such opposition will benefit members of some minority class. For example, it is not uncommon to hear arguments against race-based university admissions quotas which feature prominently some statistical argument showing that quotas have not benefitted black people, even though this is really beside the point. Any principled objection to such a program will be primarily concerned about the distorting injustice of allowing an incidental and non-academic feature such as the race of the applicant to be considered in what is meant to be an evaluation of academic ability. The righteousness of the program would hardly improve on discovery that it were effective!

People understandably get tired of playing these self-censorship games. And a common, if wholly irrational, way to lash out is to embrace the objectionable opinions that are their targets. Sensing that the dice are being loaded, they wonder why. After all, can’t rational positions stand on their own merits? Why, if the standard narrative on race we’re constantly fed is true, is there the whiff of Maoism about the way people discuss it? Why would the truth need to stack the deck against its opponents in this way? And so they become racists themselves, either out of simple frustration or on the intellectually lazy assumption that given a position which employs social taboo to silence objection, that which it opposes must be right.

I think these are the kinds of racists that libertarian sites and publications attract. Not people who are actually dedicated to the subjugation of one race by another, but people who have recognized the disingenuous character of public discussions of race and become confused. Since libertarians are outside of political orthodoxy in general and willing to call bullshit on things like affirmative action besides, such people think they have found fellow travellers in us.

They have not. Racism is anathema to libertarianism. People to us are individuals first, middle and last. We do not believe in collective virtue or collective blame, and so the very idea of a racist policy is off the table in libertarian discussions. This perhaps enables us to discuss racial issues more freely than most people, since we do not suffer from the same unspoken guilt that adherents to collectivist political philosophies do, a guilt they suffer on account of the tacit knowledge that racism, as a form of collectivism, is at least obliquely compatible with what they believe on other issues. This frees us from the goofy taboos that characterize mainstream discussions on the subject, and with it comes the unintended side effect that what we might call “protest racists” (racists who are racists because they are confused by the disingenuous terms of mainstream discussions on the subject, rather than out of a real desire to subjugate along racial lines) think they’ve found in us their soul mates.

This, then, is the full answer to Peter’s question. Some racists are attracted to us because our ideology happens to have positions which enable their cause, and other racists - the kind of half-hearted racist I’ve called a “protest racist” - might be attracted to us simply because our freedom from social taboos and moral confusion on the subject is refreshing to them.

But since racism is anathema to libertarians, and since these people are unwelcome, the next question becomes what we should do about it? Finding an answer is becoming matter of some urgency. Now that people like Ron Paul are appearing on the national scene, libertarians have a real chance at national visibility and, ultimately, at calling the shots on national policy. Since any growth in libertarian influence is bound to upset the mainstream political balance, we have to be prepared to deal with a certain amount of dishonest mudslinging from the people we seek to replace. Accusations of racism are well known to be a tool in the establishment’s kit, and the more racists found hanging around libertarian sites and publications, the more effective this tool will be against us.

So what is Peter’s proposed solution? Simple, really - we’ll just “be reasonable.”

To me, the solution is the one that even Rand did not pursue: the primacy of reason. Where were the Objectivists in the 1960s (or before and after) in denouncing such an abject form of unreason as racism, and in recognizing that such unreason is not to be countenanced in any fashion whatsoever? Instead, too many Randians (and certainly their less-philosophical cousins the libertarians) have focused on the surface political issue of property rights instead of the more fundamental issue of prejudice, bigotry, and unreason.

Here’s where I part ways with him a bit. Oh, not on the issue of the primacy of reason. I suppose we all claim reason as a primary value; I am no different in thinking that I am pretty darn reasonable! What I object to here is the idea that “the issue of prejudice, bigotry, and unreason” is the “more fundamental” issue. Or, more accurately, I would argue that reason itself tells us that property rights are fundamental and issues of bigotry are incidental.

In libertarian - or, what the hell, let’s call it “Objectivist” since I am indeed an admirer of Rand’s political philosophy - philosophy, the state is a means to the end of securing rights and nothing more. Individuals are responsible for their own livelihood and prosperity. In a libertarian society, no one may compel anyone to do anything, save respect his rights.

So the obvious question becomes one of what things are rights and what things are not. Answering that question is a subject which obviously requires more sensitivity than a blog entry can provide, but what I can say is that libertarians hold rights to be almost axiomatic - they are self-evident in light of the nature of man and his place in the world. One thing I’ve always found a good rule of thumb for identifying such an issue is the test of whether conflict on a subject could be tolerated. If there is “middle ground” between two opposing positions on an issue or a way to ethically compromise, then a principle of rights is probably not involved. Applying this test to property, it is easy to see that a right is involved. I cannot simultaneously own something and also allow that you have claims on how I use it (aside, of course, from any claims you make that I not use it in such a way that violates your other rights - such as my owning a gun and using it to kill you when you have not attacked me) - such a thing violates the notion of “property.” Either a thing is mine or it isn’t. But no such principle seems to be involved in the case of discrimination. What principle does discriminating against someone on the basis of their race really violate? Well, you could say, as Peter says, that it violates the principle that people should behave rationally. And so it does. But this seems a poor “principle” to write into law, or to make the basis of a claim of rights. After all, every living human is irrational more than occasionally. Some of us may strive to perfect rationality, but we all of us fall short. It hardly seems workable to make a crime out of something that everyone is going to do eventually. It’s sort of like if God were to say that He’s sending everyone to Hell who farts at least once in his lifetime. So that’s all of us, then - might as well get on with some gluttony and lust if we’re already condemned, eh? I suppose you could try again and say that it violates the principle that people shouldn’t discriminate, but that doesn’t seem workable either. If we take discriminate in the broad sense, we’d obviously be prohibiting any kind of basis for decision-making at all, which would be silly. If we take it in the narrow sense of “discriminate on the basis of racial characteristics” then we run into an implementational problem. What constitutes racial discrimination? How do we know when we’ve seen it? Who gets to say when there’s discrimination going on? As we are talking about distinguishing motivations for actions which may, on the surface, be identical (for example, I refuse to hire a particular black man because he’s black, or I refuse to hire a particular black man because I don’t think he’s a good fit for the job - either way the result is that I refused to hire a black man. The situations are indistinguishable on the surface without a lot of outside second-guessing about my motives.), these questions are non-trivial. There doesn’t seem to be a way to implement this principle without violating the sanctity of a lot of other things that seem as though they should be rights (the right to one’s property, the right to act on one’s own reasoning, the right to free association, to name but a few). More tellingly, though, there’s a compromise available, and that’s that the individuals in question simply have nothing to do with each other. All that we really need demand is equal protection under the law. If we live in a society that affords this, then my property is mine and yours is yours, and if I am so silly as to refuse you service on the basis of your race, then you are free to take your business elsewhere.

There are some things that need to be enshrined as rights, and some things which will come to be uncommon as society evolves. Property ownership is an example of the former, racial discrimination the latter. Rational behavior is not something we can enforce - but that’s OK because rational behavior rewards itself over time. That’s the basis for calling it “rational,” after all - it’s behavior in accordance with conclusions based on obersvations about nature arrived at through the principles of proper reasoning. It is behavior in response to the way the world actually operates, as it were. If racial discrimination really is irrational (as it surely is), then no free-market econonmy will ultimately reward racist behavior. If I am willing to hire qualified candidates regardless of their race and you are not, then obviously my business has a larger hiring pool than yours and will presumably end up with more-qualified staff. Etc. Now - it’s worth stressing that the illusion of the profitability of irrational behavior will persist. In this way, it’s not unlike a poker game. Sometimes you win big just by accident, by betting high before you have all the knowledge you need to be assured of a win. But such gambles rarely pay off in the long run. They afford you impressive victories on individual hands, but usually not over the course of an entire evening. And so it is with irrational behavior. On the local view, it may appear to be working out - but given time, it will ultimately not pay off.

So what is to be done about racism in the libertarian movement, then? The short answer: not much more than we’re already doing. Perhaps we could be doing a better job than we’re doing policing our own. That is, we could be quicker and more forceful about showing the racists that do show up the door, or quicker and more forceful about showing them the flaws in their arguments. Still, too much of this - too quick and too forceful - and it gets to be the same kind of hyperbolic witchhunt that characterizes mainstream discourse on the subject. Racism is a political sin - but no more so than fascism of any kind. We must be careful to remain cognizant that the reason we’re singling it out for special treatment is simply a kind of pandering to political reality - because the mainstream discourse gives it this importance. Reality, of course, is that it is one among many threats to liberty, and we must not become so focused on exorcising racism that we forget that there are other very real enemies of human liberty as well.

The long answer: we could reach out to minorities. Like it or not - polls show that libertarianism is a white man’s club. This should change. For whatever reason, we’ve done a poor job recruiting minorities to the cause, and this is, of course, an issue that compounds itself. The longer we’re a white man’s club, the less comfortable minorities will feel joining the club. Maybe on an intellectual level they’re attracted to some of our ideas (a commenter on Samizdata points out that blacks bear the brunt of police intimidation tactis and are receptive to the small-state message on that basis alone) - but if they look at us and see a white man’s club that includes a disturbing number of racist-seeming hangers-on, they’re not likely to take a very close or thoughtful look before moving on to something else. The best way, I think, to dispell the perception (that Peter so aptly characterizes in his column) popular with the public that there’s racism simmering just below the surface in our movement is to have a lot of minorities hanging about. It is, after all, just a perception that racists are attracted to our philospohy. That philosophy as stated has no room for racists, and this is a point we should be doing a better job selling to those parts of the public that were victims of racism within living memory.

Of course, it’s nice to mouth platitudes like “reach out to minorities,” but difficult to put such a suggestion into action. Reach out how? That’s the rub. I don’t have too many creative suggestions here. What mainstream commentators mean when they say “reach out” usually involves policies that are off limits to us - wealth redistrubtion policies or racist affirmative action preferences policies. If we start compromising our principles just to add a few black faces here and there to our rolls, we’ll have given away the farm - become the irrational, collectivist thing we oppose. No, I’m afraid this has to be done on an individual, case-by-case basis - otherwise known as “the hard way.” One approach that we could take, though, is to aggressively point out something that is obvious to us, but not to the general public: that the witch hunt against racists is itself counterproductive to minority liberation. Race has been used quite effectively by Jesse Jackson and his ilk to keep his constituents dependent on him. By telling them that only government programs can save them, but that none of the ones that have been provided so far have been adequate, he creates an endless supply of problems uniquely suited for his talents to “solve.” It’s a dependency cycle, and we should be more aggressive in pointing this out. We should also be more aggressive in pointing out the kind of awkwardness that mainstream discourse about race creates between members of various races. People are not as stupid as their political masters think: they smell a rat whenever they hear silly statements like the one about the Jena Six campaign quoted above. The author of that statment may think he is drawing a hard line against racism, but he’s actually accomplishing just the opposite. Any black man hearing that quote in a discussion will sense the insincerity. He will sense that the hyperoble isn’t really for him so much as for making the author feel better about himself, a fact which strongly implies that the author is dealing with inner racist demons that any member of a minority would do well to steer clear of. Libertarians have a unique opportunity to cut through the policitically correct fog, in other words, something which I think is ultimately more comforting to members of minorities than it is to the whites who are currently the most vocal in their denunciation of it. What will work, counterintuitive though it currently seems, is being more vocal about the fact that we are the ONLY completely non-racist political philosophy, and not shying away from saying why. Resist the temptation to always flee to “because the War on Drugs targets black men” or “because gun control hurts blacks the most.” These are insincere pandering methods, and your listeners are smart enough to see through that. What works in the end is the straight shot. Explain that affirmative action is racist and why, that only entrepreneuship and hard work will create prosperity in the long run, and that we don’t trust the government any more than they do and that that’s WHY they should avoid depending on it for solutions.

I realize that this is a bit unsatisfying. But that’s life as a libertarian, I’m afraid. One emotional downer about our philosophy is that there are no silver bullets. The Democrats get all teary every four years at their convention because they think the man (or, this year, possibly the woman) on stage really does have the power to click the ruby slippers three times and make social ills go away. We have never indulged in such fantasies. It would be unseemly to start indulging in them about race. The truth is we have a hard sell on this issue - like we do on every issue. So what can I say but roll up your sleeves and get to work?

This is quite simply the most inspiring bit of reading I’ve done in a good long time. It’s from Ezra Levant, the courageous publisher of the Western Standard who published the Mohammed Cartoons in his newspaper at the height of the ridiculous controversy and then again yesterday on his blog. The link goes to his opening statement to the “Alberta Human Rights Commission,” a tribunal that he rightly calls a “kangaroo court.” You see, he’s been brought up on essentially the complaint that he hurt an imam’s very very delicate feelings by publishing the cartoons, as though any religious nutball’s feelings were somehow more important than the human right to free speech.

I got this from a post on Samizdata, where Perry de Havilland calls it “a master class in confronting the enemies of liberty.” Indeed. It is spectacular. Go have a read, and then watch the videos he’s posted of it, and then click the link provided and donate to help with his legal fees.